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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Contents Vol 67(9)

Microwave Flash Pyrolysis: C9H8 Interconversions and Dimerisations

Aida Ajaz A , Alicia C. Voukides A , Katharine J. Cahill A , Rajesh Thamatam A , Sarah L. Skraba-Joiner A and Richard P. Johnson A B
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations

A Department of Chemistry, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03857, USA.

B Corresponding author. Email: richard.johnson@unh.edu

Australian Journal of Chemistry 67(9) 1301-1308 https://doi.org/10.1071/CH14238
Submitted: 13 April 2014  Accepted: 29 April 2014   Published: 12 June 2014

Abstract

The pyrolysis of 2-ethynyltoluene, indene, fluorene, and related compounds has been studied by sealed tube microwave flash pyrolysis (MFP), in concert with modelling of putative mechanistic pathways by density functional theory (DFT) computations. In the MFP technique, samples are admixed with graphite and subjected to intense microwave power (150–300 W) in a quartz reaction tube under a nitrogen atmosphere. The MFP reaction of 2-ethynyltoluene gave mostly indene, the product of a Roger Brown rearrangement (1,2-H shift to a vinylidene) followed by insertion. An additional product was chrysene, the likely result of hydrogen atom loss from indene followed by dimerisation. The intermediacy of dimeric bi-indene structures was supported by pyrolysis of bi-indene and by computational models. Benzo[a]anthracene and benzo[c]phenanthrene are minor products in these reactions. These are shown to arise from pyrolysis of chrysene under the same MFP conditions. MFP reaction of fluorene gave primarily bi-fluorene, bifluorenylidene, and dibenzochrysene, the latter derived from a known Stone–Wales rearrangement.


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